Silent Witnesses (28 page)

When the examining magistrate, M. Heughebaert, arrived at the scene, he ordered that the body be examined immediately. During the postmortem it was noted that Gustave's cheeks were blistered and his mouth and throat covered with burns. It was apparent from this that the cause of death could not have been a stroke, but that the deceased had somehow come to drink some sort of corrosive substance. These circumstances were considered sufficiently suspicious that Bocarmé and Lydie were placed immediately under arrest. The leading chemist in the country was Jean Servais Stas; Heughebaert sent the contents of Gustave's stomach to him in Brussels.

When he began his analysis, Stas was surprised to note the smell of vinegar coming from the sample. He was also less than satisfied when he was told that it had been administered to Gustave in an effort to revive him. There was no logic to this explanation, and Stas immediately concluded that in fact the vinegar had been used in a deliberate attempt to mask other smells that might give the real cause of death away. He therefore
felt it necessary to subject the contents of Gustave's stomach to stringent testing. There were, as we know, tests to determine the presence of poisons such as arsenic in tissue; however, this required destroying the tissue itself. When the same process was used when attempting to detect nonmetallic poisons, it resulted in the poison being destroyed too. He therefore had to proceed carefully.

Stas purified the stomach contents through repeated washing and filtration. He realized that the substances the stomach might contain would be soluble in either water or alcohol, but certainly not in both. Therefore, by putting a sample of the stomach contents in alcohol, he could separate the substances it contained. After purifying the contents, he mixed them with liquid ether, meaning any poison dissolved into it. Ether weighs less than water, so a layer of ether formed on top of the water. He then separated the ether from the water and let it evaporate. This left behind an oily liquid that smelled of tobacco. Nicotine in even small quantities can be a deadly poison, and Stas now began to suspect that this was how Gustave had been killed. Cautiously, he tasted a tiny amount of the substance. Not only did it taste foul, but it burned his lips, mouth, and tongue. The substance was indeed nicotine. By the time he had finished extracting all of it from the stomach contents, he had enough to kill ten men.

A murder plot had been discovered despite all its imagined cleverness, and Lydie and Bocarmé were put on trial. There was considerable evidence against them: Bocarmé had an interest in both science and agriculture, and would certainly have been aware that in sufficient quantity, nicotine was a deadly poison, and also aware that as a vegetable-based poison it was supposed to be undetectable. The prosecution contended that when he
had learned of Gustave's impending marriage, Bocarmé had personally extracted nicotine from tobacco leaves in order to poison him. When Gustave came for lunch, they claimed, Bocarmé and Lydie must have forced him to the floor and poured it down his throat—its strong taste would have made it impossible to put poison in his food undetected. He would quickly have lost consciousness, allowing them to administer even more of the poison. Then they used vinegar in order to mask the true cause of death. Despite their precautions, it was the burns that caused suspicion.

The defendants had a different story to tell. Bocarmé admitted that he had indeed distilled nicotine but claimed to have done so out of scientific interest rather than as part of some nefarious plot. He said that vessels containing nicotine had been in the dining room and that his wife must have accidentally used one to fill Gustave's wine glass. In short, the death had been a tragic accident. Lydie, on the other hand, claimed that Bocarmé had plotted her brother's murder and had forced her to assist him under duress.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the court did not accept Bocarmé's explanation of events. He was convicted and was executed by guillotine on July 19, 1851. Lydie, on the other hand, was acquitted in spite of strong circumstantial evidence against her. (According to the servants, it was she who dismissed everyone from the room shortly before Gustave's death.) The Stas test for detecting vegetable poisons is still used to this day—a lasting tribute to an ingenious man.

The Victorian era is generally regarded as one of poisoning's heydays, and certainly some of the most notorious cases occurred
during this time. This must in large part be due to the fact that poisons of various sorts were now readily obtainable from shops—arsenic could be easily extracted from flypaper or rat poison, for example. In fact, poison became so popular as a means of murder that specific legislation such as the Arsenic Act of 1851 was brought in to try to control it. The fact that life insurance policies were becoming more common might also have been a factor, introducing as they did a new and serious motive for murder. Bizarrely it was also not unknown for people to deliberately take arsenic in small quantities as a kind of pick-me-up or tonic (see
Plate 13
)—it was even regarded as having aphrodisiac properties.

The combination of these facts made the case of Florence and James Maybrick in 1889 a complicated one. Florence Maybrick (née Chandler) was born in Mobile, Alabama, to wealthy parents—her father was a partner in a bank and one-time mayor of the town. While traveling to Britain on board a ship with her mother, she made the acquaintance of a rich cotton merchant, James Maybrick. She was only nineteen, making the forty-two-year-old Maybrick twenty-three years her senior. In spite of this age gap, their relationship blossomed, and on July 27, 1881, they married in London before moving to set up home in Liverpool.

Things seemed to go well at first; the couple were well known on the Liverpool social scene and to outside observers appeared very happy. In truth, however, their home life was far from ideal and worsened over the years. James was frequently unfaithful and had a number of mistresses, one of whom bore him five children. Perhaps prompted by the behavior of her husband, Florence entered into several extramarital relationships herself. One of these was with a local businessman called Alfred Brierley.
When rumors about this affair came to James's ears, he flew into a violent rage. Then, apparently unconcerned at his own hypocrisy, he announced his intention of divorcing her.

However, on April 27, 1889, James was suddenly taken ill. His doctors treated him for acute dyspepsia but, in spite of their ministrations, his condition continued to worsen. He died at home on May 11, 1889. During the period of his illness, on May 8, Florence wrote a letter to Alfred, which was intercepted by the house nanny, Alice Yapp, and sent instead to James's brother Edwin. Its contents were compromising, laying bare as they did the nature of the relationship between Florence and Alfred. As a result Edwin and the elder Maybrick brother, Michael, became convinced that Florence had murdered James so that she could take his money and be with Alfred instead.

A postmortem revealed traces of arsenic in James Maybrick's body but not in sufficient quantities to have proved fatal. It was known that James had regularly used arsenic as a tonic, and indeed a city chemist confirmed that he had supplied him with it for years. A later search of the home would reveal arsenic in sufficient quantities to kill fifty people. It would therefore seem reasonable to at least admit the possibility that the arsenic found in James's system was there as a result of self-administering.

But the Maybrick family was certain that Florence must have had a hand in the death, and after an inquest she was charged with murder and sent for trial at St. George's Hall, Liverpool. One of the most significant pieces of evidence against her was the discovery that she had bought flypaper earlier that same April and had soaked it in a bowl of water in order to extract
the arsenic. She claimed that this was with the intention of using it as a beauty treatment, which was indeed yet another common use for the deadly substance. In spite of her protestations of innocence, and in spite of the fact that the arsenic found in James's body was not a lethal dose, Florence was found guilty and sentenced to death. It is probable that the jury was swayed by the fact that James had been about to divorce Florence, which in Victorian society would ruin her. The fact that she herself had been proved unfaithful would also have helped cast her as the kind of “scarlet woman” capable of committing murder.

Nevertheless, the verdict was controversial, and the case became a real cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1894 fresh evidence came to light—a prescription had been found inside Florence's Bible for a face wash that involved preparing arsenic. If she had arsenic readily available, it seemed strange that she would go to the trouble of extracting it from flypaper. Despite her sentence being commuted to life imprisonment, there was no possibility of an appeal. When Florence was finally released in January 1904, she returned to the United States, still protesting her innocence, and wrote a book entitled
Fifteen Lost Years.
She died alone and in poverty on October 23, 1941. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, this case serves to remind us that forensics cannot answer every question definitively. We will never know for sure whether Florence dosed James with arsenic or whether it was found in his body simply because he took it himself. We do know that it seems highly unlikely that the amount of arsenic detected in his body would have caused his death, and this reminds us of another important fact: forensic evidence is useless if people wish to ignore it because it does not fit with their view of what happened.

As James's habit of taking nonlethal quantities of arsenic shows, the dosage of a particular substance is usually the crucial factor in whether or not it is deadly. And even when somebody administers a potentially lethal substance to another person with bad intent, they may not always wish to kill. It is not unknown for a criminal to incapacitate a victim with a smaller dose of a poisonous substance for the purposes of rape, robbery, or kidnap. However, while a doctor is always extremely careful when prescribing drugs, and will take into account health, weight, allergies, and the like, criminals have no such expert knowledge. The following case demonstrates how this can result in consequences far more tragic than the crime originally planned.

In Manchester, England, in February 1889, a hackney carriage picked up two men, one elderly and one young. The young man ordered the driver to take them to a pub in Deansgate. When they arrived, they asked the driver if he would wait, telling him that they would not be long. Sure enough, a short while later they both emerged from the pub and directed the driver to take them to Stretford Road. While they were en route, a passerby suddenly started calling out to the driver, trying to attract his attention. At this, he reined in the horses and stopped to find out what the person wanted. The passerby explained that he had just seen a man leap from the carriage while it was moving and disappear into a nearby alleyway. The driver climbed down, and together the two of them searched for the man, to no avail. It seemed safe to assume that this was just another case of a run-off—a passenger who dashes off without paying his fare once he is near his destination. It was irritating but not worth wasting any more time over.

Then he remembered that he still had another passenger in
the carriage; looking inside, he saw that the elderly man was still in his seat, apparently asleep. When the driver attempted to rouse him, the old man just pushed him away, without opening his eyes, insisting on being left alone. He appeared very unwell. The driver summoned the police; the constable, seeing what state the old man was in, ordered him to drive straight to the hospital rather than to the police station. By the time they arrived, the old man was already dead.

On examining him, doctors could smell alcohol and, since there were no signs of violence on the body, concluded that he must have died of a heart attack. As a matter of routine the constable took a brief description of the young man who had leapt from the carriage—5 feet 3 inches, clean-shaven, dressed in a brown suit and felt hat—but nothing further was done at the time.

However, the postmortem on the body revealed that the old man certainly hadn't died from a heart attack—after testing for other poisons including morphine and strychnine, the examiner discovered that in fact he had suffered chloral hydrate poisoning. As a result the police became involved in the case once more, with Detective Constable Jerome Caminada in charge of inquiries. Born and bred in Manchester, Caminada knew the streets of the city, and its criminals, better than most. He quickly came to a number of conclusions. First, he deduced that, since the old man's pockets were empty, he had probably been robbed. It also seemed more than likely that the address in Stretford Road had simply been given as a blind in order to get the cabby away from the pub and to give the criminal time to get away. The victim's name, it transpired, was John Fletcher, a prominent local businessman, county councillor, and justice of the peace. Why, pondered Caminada, would a man of such standing share
a cab with a man who was obviously not of the same class and whom he had no reason to trust?

Caminada discovered that Fletcher had left his home that day to travel to nearby Knutsford, where he intended to spend a few days. He had lunched in town and had arranged to meet an old friend for dinner at seven that evening. Given this, it seemed even stranger that he should have ignored these plans and instead gone to a public house with the man who was to be his murderer.

Caminada went undercover. In disguise, he searched the streets and hung out in low drinking houses, searching for any scraps of information that might help him track down the killer. He was in luck—a cab driver he met happened to remember a flashy young man who had been throwing money around. He had taken him to a pub that was a hangout for boxers, gamblers, and anyone else connected to the fight game. Caminada immediately saw a connection: chloral hydrate was used by doctors as an anaesthetic, but it was also occasionally used by unscrupulous promoters as a knockout drop in order to fix fights.